ABSTRACT
At their summit meeting in Lisbon in 2000, EU leaders set the ambitious goal for the EU of becoming the world’s most competitive economy by 2010 and agreed on a comprehensive structural reform agenda to boost employment and liberalize markets, now known as the ‘Lisbon strategy’. The overarching objective of this strategy is to enhance the capacity of the EU economy to generate high rates of non-inflationary growth over a prolonged period. This requires pressing ahead with deep, comprehensive reforms of product, capital and labour markets, backed up by a sound macroeconomic policy-mix aiming at sustained rates of growth close to potential within an environment of price stability.
